[rescue] Re: ethernet and switches,

[Robert Rose]

On 23/04/2004, at 12:58 PM, Dave wrote:
>> I also don't think it ever had a chance against ethernet in the
>> marketplace.
>
>    In what marketplace?  It was the mainstay of core networking for a
> long time.  Cisco specifically steered people away from FDDI for what
> seemed to be political reasons, and since (like it or not) Cisco gear
> is the mainstay of core networking, they successfully tanked FDDI.
Cisco's FDDI implementation wasn't that good in the mid-90's.  At 
$WORK-7 we had a core of 3 AGS+ connected with an FDDI ring, and bought 
a few sbus FDDI cards for our new SparcServer 1000's to join them to 
the ring.  We used to shut down all hosts every Sunday morning to 
single user mode, ran backups to tape and reboot, so the FDDI ring 
would wrap while the boxes rebooted.

"Yeah, so what"? you say, well when two boxes adjacent on the ring 
happened to be rebooting at the same time, the damn Ciscos saw two 
failures in the ring and shut the whole ring down! Management's 
solution was to ditch the whole FDDI setup and go fast ethernet.  I 
couldn't even to convince them to keep an FDDI ring just for the 1000's 
as a dedicated backup/NFS network, despite the only problem that we 
ever had was when the Cisco routers were in the ring.

Rob